Information on the web exists in the form of hyperlinks that appear in different web sites. A news site for example may contain headlines that are hyperlinks to their detailed exposition. Custom Internet portals to display web-centric information exist (e.g., myYahoo, myLycos etc.). The level of customization is however, fairly minimal. In typical portals, the user chooses from a pre-determined set of headlines collected from a predetermined set of web-sites. The user has no control over either the web-sites he/she gets the content from or the headlines that are taken from those web-sites. Further, the user has very little control over how the information is presented.
For example, if the user is interested in Indian politics, Soccer, Cricket, and Semiconductor High Tech companies, myYahoo allows the user to configure Yahoo's news source to filter through news on these topics. However, the user must take all this content strictly from Yahoo-selected content providers. This arrangement prohibits users from choosing not just the type of content but the source of the content as well. While, for example, a user may want to be able to receive world politics news from his two favorite Indian news dailies every morning, get his Hi-Tech news coverabe from Red Herring and Cnet, and get sports news from Cricket.org and dailysoccer.com, access to all these sites through a prior art internet portal would be predicated on the Internet portal offering access to all of the particular site via that particular portal.
What is needed is a method that allows the user to completely configure both the source and content that he/she wants on his/her own portal as well as allow others to access the portal. What is further needed is communications between portals of various users.